9/11: The Ultimate Triumph of the Strategy of Tension (II)

by
Wayne Madsen

The attacks of September 11 are a continuation of the strategy of tension. They represent nothing new in Washington policies, if not an escalation to extend this strategy on a global scale. They provided the pretext for setting up an international monitoring system and to further the expansion of imperial wars. From this point of view, the commemoration of the tenth anniversary was used by the sponsors of the attacks to pose once more as victims, all the better to persevere with their goals.

After years of employing the fascistic “strategy of tension” in Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the neo-conservatives who dominated the Bush administration on the eve of September 11, 2001, were confident that the ultimate act of destroying the World Trade Center in New York and bombing the Pentagon, in addition to destroying a yet unknown target by United flight 93 – shot down by U.S. Air Force fighter-interceptors over Pennsylvania – would bring about the sea change foreseen by the neo-conservatives.

What the neo-conservative cabal, through their propaganda outlets like Fox News and The Washington Post, brought forth after their long-awaited “New Pearl Harbor,” was their reference to America’s “new normal,” the de facto imposition of a crypto-fascist dictatorship that overturned the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, and onset of the “clash of civilizations,” the final showdown between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. The geo-social-political “Armageddon” hoped for by such neo-fascist philosophers as Professors Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis would be a final battle that would see the downfall of Islamic governments and regimes from Morocco to Indonesia and the triumph of “western civilization.” In fact, “western civilization” is code for the twin pillars of capitalist-backed militarism and Zionism.

The “strategy of tension” employed by NATO stay-behind networks in Europe from the 1960s to the present day is defined by Swiss professor of contemporary history Daniele Ganser as the method by which “world powers divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false flag terrorist actions” to achieve their ultimate goals. The September 11, 2001, false flag attacks in New York and Virginia succeeded in laying the groundwork for a concerted disinformation, psychological warfare, and propaganda campaign that, ten years following 9/11, are being cited by the corporate media as having” changed the world.” Even the date, 9/11, was chosen as a psychological warfare tool, 911 being the emergency phone number used by Americans to call for assistance from law enforcement and other emergency responders.

George Orwell’s “tele-screen,” the means by which Big Brother largely maintained control over public opinion by hyping non-existent threats to public safety, became real in the minutes following the 9/11 attacks when the corporate new channels, all seemingly pre-programmed for the terror event, began instilling fear in the minds of Americans and people around the world. In the months after 9/11, anyone who questioned the official version of events was painted as a disloyal “conspiracy theorist.” However, there were thousands of more facts presented by those who contradicted the official version of 9/11 than any dubious explanations presented in the official 9/11 Commission report and other government documents, including those from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The corporate news channels, led by Fox News, concocted unbelievable threats following 9/11, including exploding bombs being placed inside cows, terrorist frogmen coming ashore on America’s beaches, Al Qaeda attacking shopping malls in the United States, and Arab terrorists infiltrating Latin American human smuggling routes from Mexico. All of the fear stories were rank nonsense and not based on any facts.

After the anthrax postal system attacks on Congress and the media, which ensured the quick passage by Congress of the unconstitutional USA-PATRIOT Act, the failed attempt by a shoe bomber to bring down a plane flying from Paris to Miami, and a later attempt by a Nigerian flying from Amsterdam to Detroit to set off explosive material in his underpants, the public was conditioned to accept anything as a potential threat to security and safety. Nothing was mentioned about Israel’s role in the anthrax attacks and the two failed airplane bombings. The only individuals arrested on 9/11 for suspicion that they were involved in the 9/11 attacks were five employees of Weehawken, New Jersey-based Urban Moving Systems. FBI agents who visited the firm’s warehouse in Weehawken not only found bomb-making materials but traces of anthrax. The owner of the firm, Dominick Suter, was later discovered in a joint CIA-FBI counter-intelligence database to be a Mossad agent. Some of the Israeli “movers” arrested were also found to be in the database.

The five Israeli “movers” were witnessed celebrating and videotaping the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center, minutes after the first plane struck, from their vantage point at Liberty State Park, across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. It was an Israeli aviation security company, ICTS International, replete with ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Bet officers in its management, that handled airport security at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and Amsterdam’s Schipol International Airport, where Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” attempted their amateurish bombing attempts on American Airlines flight 63 and Northwest Airlines flight 253, respectively. ICTS also shared security responsibilities at Boston’s Logan Airport on September 11, 2001, the airport where American Airlines flight 11 was allegedly hijacked by Mohammed Atta and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In pushing the neo-conservative notion of the “clash of civilizations,” there was no mention made by the Israeli-influenced corporate media about the numerous connections of Israel to the 9/11 attacks. Nineteen Arab hijackers, 16 of whom hailed from Saudi Arabia, was the official story and there would be no deviation from the official line. Even statements by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak on American television that 9/11 was beneficial to Israel were ignored by the media. Those who were brave enough to point out Israeli connections to 9/11 were intimidated by the old canard that they were “anti-Semitic.”

Some corporate news stations that reported on suspicious Israeli intelligence activities in the months prior to 9/11 saw their stories “tombstoned” on the Internet. A four-part series on the Israeli activity aired by Fox News quickly disappeared from its website. Similar stories, such as the following, also quickly evaporated into the ether:

“10/02/2001 - Fifteen People Arrested in March in Dallas, Suspected of Casing Federal Buildings. 11 News reported how people claiming to be ‘Israeli art students’ might be trying to sneak into federal buildings and defense sites, and even doing surveillance. In Dallas, the so-called students hit early this year at the city’s FBI building, the Drug Enforcement Administration and at the Earle Cabell Federal building, where guards found one student wandering the halls with a floor plan of the building.”

Osama bin Laden, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a character directly out of Hollywood central casting. Bin Laden initially denied he had anything to do with the attacks. In an interview carried by the September 28, 2001 edition of the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi Bin Laden stated, "I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act." Even FBI director Robert Mueller stated, the “FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

Few media outlets reported on Bin Laden’s longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community, links that were maintained after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. According to classified documents from French intelligence, Al Qaeda and Bin Laden had still been under the operational control of U.S. and British “security services” until 1995, fully two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As of 1996, the U.S. State Department continued to refuse to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization. Bin Laden’s past ties to the CIA may have sealed his fate. Just as with others who worked for the CIA and were then discarded like garbage, including Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi, Osama Bin Laden may have been used as a convenient decoy by the actual perpetrators of 9/11, those who wanted to blame Arabs and Muslims as part of their grand schemes” the Project for the New American Century that hoped for a “new Pearl Harbor,” those who wanted a “clash of civilizations” between Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and those who saw a continued strategy of tensions to bring about their agenda. The strategy of tension would not end with 9/11 and would be repeated in the following years in Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Jakarta, Istanbul, Casablanca, Mumbai, and Oslo…

The real architects of 9/11 are still at-large and continue their strategy of tension campaign. On September 11, 2011, many of the key perpetrators will gather at the “Ground Zero” site in New York to publicly honor those who were killed in the attacks, but privately celebrate their accomplishments over the last ten years. The corporate media will continue to propagate the myth of 9/11 and the public, they hope, will continue to accept the official version of the events.

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